Year of No Sugar (6 page)

⁴
Robert Lustig, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” YouTube video, 1:29:28, University of California Television, posted by UCTV, July 30, 2009,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

⁵
Schiller, J.S., J.W. Lucas, B.W. Ward, and J.A. Peregoy, “Summary Health Statistics for U.S. Adults: National Health Interview Survey, 2010,”
Vital Health and Statistics
, 10(252), 2012, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_10/sr10_252.pdf

⁶
aka, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis

⁷
Ludwig J., T.R. Viggiano, D.B. McGill, and B.J. Oh. “Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis: Mayo Clinic Experiences with a Hitherto Unnamed Disease—Abstract,” Mayo Clin Proc. 1980 Jul; 55(7): 434–8,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7382552

⁸
David Gillespie,
Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat
, (Australia: Penguin, 2008) 120.

⁹
Kenneth D. Kochanek, M.A.; Jiaquan Xu, M.D.; Sherry L. Murphy, B.S.; Arialdi M. Miniño M.P.H.; and Hsiang-Ching Kung, Ph.D., Division of Vital Statistics. “Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2009: National Vital Statistics Reports,”
National Vital Statistics Reports
vol. 59, no. 4 (March 16, 2011) U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_04.pdf

¹⁰
According to a recent count,
eighty percent
of packaged food products contain added sugar. Robert H. Lustig, M.D.,
Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease
, (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2012) 234.

¹¹
Gillespie,
Sweet Poison,
114.

¹²
Gillespie,
Sweet Poison
, 115.

¹³
Gillespie,
Sweet Poison
, 99.

¹⁴
“Diseases and Conditions: Metabolic Syndrome,” Cleveland Clinic,
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/disorders/metabolic_syndrome/hic_metabolic_syndrome.aspx

¹⁵
For the record, I have no idea what this means.

¹⁶
Ford, Earl S., MD, MPH; Wayne H. Giles, MD, MSc; William H. Dietz, MD, PhD, “Prevalence of the Metabolic Syndrome Among U.S. Adults: Findings from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey,”
The Journal of the American Medical Association
, vol. 287, no. 3 (January 16, 2002),
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/287/3/356

¹⁷
Although I have seen other estimates as high as seventy-five million.

¹⁸
Gillespie,
Sweet Poison
, 120.

“We should just go home.
Let's just go home
,” Steve said in the voice he uses when he's trying not to be angry and failing.

“We can't go home without at least eating,” I objected.

“Well,
there's nowhere for us to eat
!” He was exasperated and losing it, and truthfully, so was I. We were both long past hungry. It was cold and dark, and we were driving around in circles trying to figure out what to do. The movie we had been hoping to make had already started. Fast food restaurants, chain restaurants were
everywhere
, but because we were not eating sugar, there was no place we could eat. This was turning out to be one big bummer of a date night.

As Steve fumed to the point where I suspected steam might emit from his ears, I quietly began to wonder for the first time what effect our Year of No Sugar would have on our marriage. And did I mention this was only
January
?

Originally, our plan for the night had seemed so simple: Panera was right across the way from the movie theater and has been our not-so-fast-food-y fast food of choice for some time. Even if we couldn't eat most of the sandwiches on the
menu—we suspected sugar in the bread, sugar in the deli meats, sugar in the condiments—we could surely get a quick
salad
, right?

Well, if I learn anything at all from our Year of No Sugar, it will be to never assume anything ever again. We were delighted to be the only folks at the counter—no line! No waiting! We'd make this movie yet. We ordered two chicken Caesar salads.

“Would you like baguette, apple, or chips with that?” asked the young lady manning the cash register.

“Does the baguette have sugar in it?” my husband asked. The young lady said she could check and proceeded to haul out the large, three-ring binder I now know exists in most chain restaurants on a shelf just under the counter. She paged through the plastic sheets. Yes, it did.

“What about the chicken salad?” I asked. “Would you mind looking that up for us?”

“Oh, it's no problem,” she said, paging some more. First she looked up the Caesar dressing. “Dextrose?” she said uncertainly. Oh heck—what was
dextrose
?

“Well, what about just the salad itself, minus the dressing?” I asked. Now there were people waiting behind us. The list of dressing ingredients took up almost an entire typed sheet of paper, and the chicken salad, when she located it, was worse. There were literally
dozens
of ingredients in the “chicken salad.” Would it be too much to ask, I wondered, that the ingredients of a salad with chicken be salad and chicken?

We were starting to feel really self-conscious now. The lady at the counter was still being very nice to us, and I felt bad for her, as if we were the two cranky old people who come in at rush hour and hold up the line for twenty minutes
trying to ascertain whether there are any poppy seeds in the poppy seed muffins. Steve turned to me, defeated, and said, “There's no way we're making the movie.” The thought that we were paying our babysitter fifteen dollars an hour so that we could drive thirty minutes each way to spend our evening reading ingredient lists at a Panera for our date night was, well, depressing.

Meanwhile, she handed us the book to peruse to the side while she helped some other customers, and as I stared at the page of four million ingredients, I realized he was right: no movie—and it seemed, no dinner either. We thanked the young lady, returned the plastic pages, and left feeling beaten.

Now, let's pause a moment to reflect on this. I knew full well that we had brought this problem on
ourselves
. Not being able to find food or
specific
food that fit our parameters of the moment was certainly a First-World problem if there ever was one. Were we going to
starve
to death? No. It's worth noting here that in our culture, we've gotten rather alarmingly
used
to getting what we want pretty much right when we want it. Because of our status as contemporary Americans, we have an abundant supply of sustenance from any number of sources at almost any given moment. You can buy snacks virtually anywhere these days, from Home Depot and Jo-Ann Fabrics to your local gas station or car repair shop. How eye-opening, then, for me to realize how
much
of this abundant “food” was now off the table for us because of our family project. It made me remember that, in the grand scheme of things, refusing food is a luxury we in the First World enjoy and take for granted. We were going to have to reorient our expectations about the world around us and what we could realistically expect from it. We couldn't rely on the corporations or the car
shops or even the quick-food establishments anymore—we had to take responsibility for our nourishment in a much more fundamental way.

So here we were: food, food was everywhere, but not a thing to eat. McDonald's, Burger King, Olive Garden, all the usual fast-eating suspects were right there, and Steve and I both acting hungry enough to eat our own arms. Fortunately, after several rounds of driving in circles and sniping at one another, we settled on a local German restaurant, where I was hopeful some sausages would fit the no-sugar bill. After informing the waitress that I couldn't have a meal with sugar as an ingredient, she checked and found that the wiener schnitzel and the noodle side dish did
not
have sugar in them.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! We would both have that. Oh, and we get soup and salad with our dinners, what soup and what dressing would we like? We asked if the chowder had sugar in it, and Steve asked if the blue cheese dressing had sugar.

“Wait,” she said, “you can't have sugar
either
?” Although I had toyed with the possibilities of telling people we had a contagious sugar allergy or avoided sugar for religious reasons, so far I was just asking, as politely as possible, and not explaining very much. I figured, if people assume I have a dietary restriction due to some health concern, they may be far more likely to be accurate and truthful than if they think I'm doing this for a lark—or just to be completely annoying. This works, of course, until Steve asks
too
, in which case my cover is blown and he starts to tell our waitress about our “family project.”

“Oh, how
cool
,” our waitress enthused, which was very polite of her because I was fairly certain she didn't think it was cool at all. We chatted about the omnipresence of sugar
and such for a moment, and how hard it is to avoid sugar entirely. After a minute, she genuinely asked “So…
why
?”

“Well…to see if it can be done,” I said, which wasn't
entirely
untrue. Certainly, that was one aspect of it, although I felt like I was lying by omission in leaving out the whole “oh-and-by-the-way-sugar-is-a-chronic-toxin” thing. Although
I
had bought Dr. Lustig's argument hook, line, and sinker, I wasn't well versed enough in the biochemical specifics yet to confidently make the argument to so much as a houseplant. Plus, I'm guessing people tend to get touchy when you start telling them their restaurant serves poison.

As it turned out, all three of the soups on the menu contained sugar, as well as the blue cheese dressing. Of course. Nonetheless we enjoyed our soup-and-salad-less entrees with as much enthusiasm as if we had just discovered a Perrier fountain in the desert. As we drove home, we vowed to be more prepared in the future—and to be much bigger tippers.

_______

A few months before, in the fall, Steve and I had broken the news to the kids. Our girls, Greta, who was ten then, and Ilsa, who was five, were in the backseat of the car as we drove home from a visit to my mother's. Having thought of the idea the previous spring, I had been chomping at the bit for months on end, eager to begin, but I had no interest in doing it
alone
—the whole point to my idea being that the entire family participate. Sure,
one
person can do any ol' crazy-ass thing—eat nails, live in a Redwood tree, go over Niagara Falls in a corset and heels—but a
whole family
? That meant something much greater, would say so much more—
that
was the idea which had me lying awake at night wondering: Could
we? But so far Steve had advocated putting it off, wanting to make sure we were really ready—I saw his point. We didn't want to plunge in too fast, right? But the paranoiac in me wondered: Was he stalling? Was he waiting for me to gradually lose steam, hoping I'd eventually forget about it? If I pushed
too
hard, I risked losing his support for the idea, which was pivotal in getting the girls on board. But with the end of the calendar year now approaching, I couldn't wait any longer—I was bursting to commit to a plan, and what better time to begin a yearlong project than January first? Steve and I finally agreed: It would be January first to January first, beginning to end; it would be our Year of No Sugar.

“We're thinking of doing a special project—as a family,” I said in my best overly calm, your-parents-are-totally-sane voice. “We are thinking of not eating sugar. For a while.”

It took them about six seconds to ascertain that “no sugar” meant no cupcakes, no pie, no Christmas cookies, no Popsicles, no hot cocoa, no maple syrup, no jelly beans, no candy bars, no juice boxes, and no marshmallows. And it took them about three additional seconds to elicit that “a while” meant “a year” in parent-speak, which meant “for
ever
” in kid-speak. And they promptly burst into hysterical tears.

“Well,
that
went well,” Steve said.

In my mind, keeping it simple was the key to making our Year of No Sugar a success, both in helping us to stick to it and in communicating it to others. It didn't take long for Steve and me to lay down the few ground rules that would govern the year. We would, however, spend the rest of the year fine-tuning the details, as we came upon new information and new, unusual ingredients.

The concept
was
simple: We were
not eating added sugar
. If an item contained sugar as an ingredient, no matter how minuscule the amount, we would not eat it—this avoided any slippery-slope concerns. What did we mean by “added” sugar? Naturally occurring sugar—such as that contained in a piece of fruit—was fine, containing as it did all the beneficial fiber and micronutrients, and naturally limited the amount we ate—you'd get full before you could eat enough fructose to worry about.